BOOKS @ A-E

Almost everyone I know was affected emotionally in some way or other by David Bowie’s passing two months ago. My colleague, Dr. James Penner, had an article published by the LA Review of Books on January 2nd in which he reviewed two books that I understand were released around the same time. You can read it here: David Bowie and the 1970s: Testing the Limits of the Gendered Body

He organized the event (for which the flyer on the left was for), in which he and 3 other professors (myself included) opened a conversation with the public by giving our personal and academic perspectives. This took place at the Richardson Seminar Room, in the College of Humanities, UPR RP.

After thinking it over and over, I decided to talk about Labyrinth, having learned by asking around that it wasn’t as popular with everyone as I imagined. Perhaps I was misled by most of my friends and the entire internet. In this decade, there’s Buzzfeed posts like this one, tumblrs such as Labyrinth Confessions, tumblr theories like this one, along with other virtual shrines across decades, if you dig. It’s not difficult. Because Jareth still constantly pops up in my life, I thought this was true for almost everyone. Well, guess what I found out? It’s not. It’s only so important to a certain group of people (the ones who give a little jump or widen their eyes when you mention it) – the ones who watched it as children and discovered David Bowie first, as Jareth.

Before I continue, I want to make a disclaimer in the form of a list:

I’m posting the paper in its entirety, so please, if you go through it all, consider that I’m addressing a crowd. It’s not so much a “paper” as much as something meant to be heard in a span of 15 to 20 minutes while playing video samples as background.

I skipped some lines and elaborated in between, so if you attended, it’s not exactly the same.

I will use gifs whenever possible, even if unnecessary.

There are summaries of scenes because I do not take for granted that everyone has watched the film.

Seduced by the Goblin King: How we fell in love with David Bowie

From the music video for “Underground”

Labyrinth is a fantasy film for children directed by Jim Henson released in 1986 which, in its time, was considered a flop. However, for many people of my generation, Labyrinth was how David Bowie, already a prolific super star with a respectable repertoire, was injected into our psyches. I chose to talk about this film because, recalling the many conversations I’ve had throughout my lifetime, it seems that Bowie as the Goblin King Jareth, is the only one of his artistic personas that seduced some of us as little children. Also recalling conversations I’ve been having since my teens, Bowie was the rock star crush that we never really got over. I think this is why some of us were inconsolable the morning we found out. Our childhood crush had left us. On January 12th, the online magazine Fusion published an article by Nona Willis Aronowitz titled “David Bowie’s sexy goblin king in ‘Labyrinth’ taught us about lust.” In it, Willis quotes several people she had interviewed on the subject, confirming that the phenomenon of a generation of children becoming infatuated with a magical, somewhat evil (yet impossibly charming Bowie) with big hair is widespread. The Goblin King was, for many of us, an object of desire in our childhoods before we even understood what any of it meant.

Tumblr. Of course.

For some, watching Labyrinth over and over led to our fandom in later years, so that we would discover one of the greatest artists still alive in our time. Others would not, but would remember him as that strange character with “the pants” in that movie with the puppets. Either way, Jareth and David Bowie are inseparable by association. Had Jareth been played by anyone else, the Goblin King would not have had such a profound appeal, an appeal to which his original songs contribute immensely. The music is by Trevor Jones, but the songs with vocals were written and performed by David Bowie. The characters’ dialogue is simple enough for a child. Bowie’s lyrics, however, were perplexing, recalling it from a child’s perspective. Whenever David Bowie was singing, it seemed like the scene was a moment of truth, which I could not entirely figure out, but felt like I could almost touch it. For example, when the opening credits begin and Bowie’s “Underground” plays. There was a shift in perception then:

No one can blame you (Phew! He understands.)

For walking away (Why would anyone, though…)

Too much rejection (But she’s fine…)

No love injection (Oh, come on…)

But down in the Underground (Uh huh…)

You’ll find someone true (Man, I wish I had a baby brother so David Bowie would come in through my window…)

If you’ve watched the film before, you know what those lines are all about, and it’s dangerously exciting. The Goblin King will be summoned by 15 year-old Sarah, played by Jennifer Conelly. She will pronounce an enchantment she learned from a storybook, hoping, not knowing that Jareth would materialize in her room and that the act would bind her to a pact: by pronouncing a line in the correct order: “I wish the goblins would come take you away; right now,” Sarah has made her wishes become real.

Jareth’s goblin lackeys snatch the baby, she immediately regrets what she has done, and the adventure begins. The only way to recover baby Toby is by defeating Jareth, making her way through his very difficult and trap-laden Labyrinth, and into his court, while he tries to seduce her into staying with him. But she does not. That, I realized watching the film when I was older, was one of the reasons why I watched it so many times. I always hoped for an ending where she would stay with Jareth, because, why not?

In the middle of that dirty castle with not much to do and a bunch of ugly, funny, little goblins (presumably other baby siblings since “only forever”), was David Bowie, the Goblin King, in all his glittering glory.

Willis Aronowitz comments in her article that “Labyrinth and Bowie achieved something unusual: They respected the existence of children’s sexuality if not on a conscious then on an elemental level.”

What I will analyze, which Willis Aronowitz did not explore, is first, why appealing to children’s sexuality is something only David Bowie could pull off, and second, how it happens.

Willis talks about her own experience: “David Bowie was almost 40 by then, but to me, Jareth was ageless, genderless, species-less; he was free from real-world dynamics that may have made his toxic love for 15-year-old Sarah creepy or abusive. He was sex and power distilled to its purest form, and not in a macho, Prince Charming sort of way.” I asked one of my friends to sum up her feelings about David Bowie in Labyrinth; she responded that her interest in his music came when she was older, but that at 10 years old, Jareth was “the unreachable epitome of the bad guy without being crass or gross.” Like my friend Diana says, he was not crass, but often childish, and not gross, just odd.

I found an informal article on someone’s personal Angelfire website (woah) called “Through the Labyrinth, And What Sarah Found There” by an author with the alias Freya Lorelei, which is a sequence of analyses of mostly sexual symbolism in the film. In the last section, she talks about Jareth as paradox, a godly being with limited powers that may be Sarah’s “own invention” as a result of an Electra complex:

Since she is so young, her fantasy man is tinged with hints of androgyny. Possessing a feminine build, ruffly costumes and lots of eye makeup, Jareth is threatening, yet not overly so. He is sinister, but ultimately unable to back up his threats. “You have no power over me.” Most very young girls tend to like men that are slight and delicate in build, because they themselves resemble girls, which is familiar and comforting. Sarah, being emotionally immature, conjures up this sort of man. However, due to the aforementioned Electra complex […] he is far older than her, and clearly sexually mature.

Jareth’s physical traits as described by Freya Lorelei also describe David Bowie; even if by the late 80s his then-current image was less flamboyant than a decade earlier, androgynous or outright feminine-looking Bowie were in the collective consciousness and part of pop culture. Electra/Oedipus complexes aside, for a very young person, being infatuated with a pop star is as safe as Sarah’s dream. Electra/Oedipus complexes considered, being older has a Freudian allure. David Bowie is easily anyone’s fantasy man.

But how did David Bowie crawl into our little-kid dreams, making a permanent home in them? In many ways, Sarah’s trials in the Labyrinth resemble the way Lewis Carroll’s Alice own struggles in the Underground and the world through the Looking-Glass, stories many children came to know through several film adaptations before reading the books. The Alice books are still universally liked 150 years later, and one reason is because even though for most it appears to fantasy, it plays on the familiar (dream content – the characters and images are all distorted part of real Alice’s waking world) and the mysterious workings of the unconscious. It’s also very fun. If we appreciate Labyrinth in that same light, it might explain why some children (now grown) love Labyrinth.

Alice and Sarah aren’t the most likable heroines at first, being stubborn and sometimes arrogant. But both characters awaken from their fantasies a little wiser.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud says the language of poetry is the language of dreams. Like poems we read and discover something new when we read them years later, something that resonates inside us that we may or may not pinpoint, so do Alice and Labyrinth. They are full of imagery and symbolism that can be reread and rediscovered time and again.

What’s at stake in both Alice and Labyrinth is the main characters’ power and reassertion of self in a world that is all their own (notice all the images in Sarah’s room, like the Escher poster, the toys, even her dog, Merlin, who in the dream is Sir Didymus, another dog’s, “steed”). The Labyrinth and the creatures there are not foreign to Sarah, she knows them all, even if she does not seem to recognize them. Taking this into consideration, we can conclude that the adventure is an elaborate dream. Sarah does have a photograph of her real mother in her room next to a man who happens to be David Bowie, after all…

I didn’t make this image.

By the end of their trials, Alice and Sarah are “the babe with the power.” Alice and Labyrinth are about a child’s darker, more selfish nature, something which many childhood films and fairy tales don’t address; for this reason, some of us were enthralled. Add David Bowie’s otherworldly looks, smooth voice and catchy synthpop songs, and I think that’s the formula.

On the darker side of childhood, Alice’s two adventures in each dream world are anxious, always bordering on becoming a nightmare; she has lost nothing material, only sometimes her memory, identity, patience, temper and finally, her breaking point, when she loses control. By the end of each dream, it’s the nightmare’s climax, where she very nearly realizes she is only dreaming by recognizing and thus regaining her power. She awakes from Wonderland shouting “you’re nothing but a pack of cards!” and from Looking-Glass, grabbing the small Red Queen, a game piece, yelling, “I’ll shake you into a kitten, I will!”

Sarah has two similar almost-waking states during which she regains power: the first, after she dances with Jareth at the masquerade ball, enthralled, but then drifting from him as he watches in disappointment and with longing, unable to communicate.

“As the pain sweeps through, makes no sense for you. Every thrill is gone, wasn’t too much fun at all. But I’ll be there for you-hoo-hoo. As the world falls doooown.”

She breaks through the ballroom mirror and walks into a wasteland where an old hag opens a door for her, into her own bedroom. She falls into her bed and hugs her teddy bear, sighing “it was just a dream!” Shortly after, she opens the door thinking she’s home, but she finds the same dream-wasteland as before, recalling her purpose, which is to rescue her brother (her prime object of desire). Sarah manages to enter the castle, where Jareth tests her in an Escheresque scene, passive-aggressively begging her to love him. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you. I move the stars for no one.“

In this instance, again she is lucid. She begins to remember and recite lines from the story she knows, finally yelling “You have no power over me!” In that instant, Jareth becomes an owl and the scene transforms into Sara’s living room. She finds that baby Toby is safe and sound.

One way in which the Labyrinth dream world differs from Alice’s is how the ruler of the kingdom and antagonist is an equally attractive and repulsive, alluring and intimidating, male of whom she is object of desire (and vice versa).

Sarah’s own object is her goal: to recover her brother. The drive may be her feelings of guilt, having condemned Toby when she enunciated the charm; it may also be the fear of being responsible for losing her brother, thus losing her father’s trust and possibly, love. In the same manner that the Alice stories manifest a little girl’s unconscious working out anxieties and making sense (or non-sense) of her waking world, Labyrinth deals with a teenage girl, still a child, whose unconscious is sorting out more mature, emotional issues that develop when growing up:

social responsibility. While Sarah bonds with creatures in the Labyrinth, Alice does not truly befriend Wonderland and Looking-Glass creatures. Sarah, on the other hand, keeps the same close friends throughout the dream-story and is loyal to them.

sexual impulse. Sarah may or may not have a crush on her mother’s boyfriend, but in the dream, she must constantly refuse Jareth and reaffirm that he is the villain. She cares for her little brother, after all, and wishes not for him to become another one of the king’s goblins. She chooses Toby every time, in spite of Jareth’s overwhelming, frustrated, entitled and threatening promises of love.

k

In other words, it’s a young girl’s sex dream without there being explicit images of sex.

I know.

In her article, Freya Lorelei lists a thorough catalog of imagery in the context of Sarah’s reality throughout the entire film that reveal sex everywhere.

Some of the most obvious are Jareth/David Bowie’s very tight pants; the crystal balls he carries, rolls or throws in front of Sarah; and the cane he waves about in “Dance, Magic.”

This traces a power play in matters of desire, a real desire Sarah might secretly have, but wishes not to address.

“…uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh…”

Another possibility is not denial, but being unaware. Dreams are funny that way. Whichever it may be, the dream reveals a selfish, somewhat ugly aspect of human desire, if we look at it under a magnifying glass. In “The Function and Field of Speech in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan says the following:

Man’s freedom is entirely circumscribed within the constitutive triangle of the following: the renunciation he imposes on the other’s desire by threaten­ing to kill the other in order to enjoy the fruits of the other’s serfdom, the sac­rifice of his life that he agrees to for the reasons that give human life its measure, and the suicidal abnegation of the vanquished party that deprives the master of his victory and leaves him to his inhuman solitude.

All of the above are represented in the dynamics between Sarah and Jareth, both to the other, and are therefore a reflection of one another. They are both other to one another so, as for the first point of the triangle, both impose renunciation on the other’s desire. Both are martyrs in a figurative way: Sarah for her brother, and Jareth for Sarah, apparently. Finally, both are vanquished, although it seems that Sarah is the victor. Sarah has escaped the labyrinth alive with her brother intact, giving up what we can only assume is a mortal lifetime with Jareth that she may have been tempted to choose as an option. Jareth appears after her return as an owl in her window, and flies away in abnegation. It seems that Jareth is the serf, but it also seems like roles could be reversed easily. They are both a threat to one another, impose their own desire upon the other, and renounce the other’s desire while each being both subject and object of desire. However, it’s a mirror-reflection in a looking-glass world, as Jareth is Sarah with her mother’s boyfriend’s face.

Willis ends her article with, “In death, essential but tiny corners of a celebrity’s life often become bathed in a spotlight they’ve never known before. To us, that corner is the goblin king’s castle.”

To the other “us,” we never waited for his death to spotlight him as Jareth. We never waited at all, as we hoped he’d live forever.

I still get questions about it, and I still love to talk about it. I wrote my MA thesis, “Jacques Lacan Read Through the Looking Glass: Reflections of Subject, Self and Desire in Lewis Carroll’s Alice” in 2010 under the direction of Dr. Michael Sharp (English Department, Humanities, UPR RP). This would be the first time sharing any of it, and it’s only a tiny bit of it, because it’s over 100 pages long, so here’s just a teensy little piece of the shortened version I presented last September (you can read about that here).

If you’re curiouser, then, well, find me. Or find it at the Richardson Seminar Room in the College of Humanities. Or La Lázaro.

Lacan and Carroll share stylistic traits. The most outstanding is their fascination with the possibilities of language.

Artist credit pending.

In that respect, they have similar projects, though their didactic purposes differ. In the introduction to How to Read Lacan, Slajov Žižek, Lacanian expert, says that “the most outstanding feature of [Lacan’s] teaching is permanent self-questioning” (5). Alice repeatedly experiences self-questioning when, once in her dream worlds, everything around her becomes increasingly more difficult.

In that respect Carroll, like Lacan, obligates the reader to decipher meanings or come to their own conclusions using Alice’s point of view. In both Wonderland and Looking-Glass, Alice confronts dilemmas that Lacan contemplates, which makes them suitable for drawing connections, the purpose behind my analysis.

Alice’s character is an example of a human subject coping with society, its rules of behavior and communication (these belong in the symbolic order), her perceptions of self (in the imaginary), and her expectations, motivations and emotions (pertaining to the Real).

Alice’s character in the Wonderland book is that of a subject facing society, or social symbolic, confused and thirsting for meaning. Wonderland is Alice’s waking world distorted, where confusion is accentuated more than her enjoyment. Wonderland is very much structured like Alice’s waking world because, as a dream, it is based on it. What is true in one world can also be true in the next, realities sometimes overlapping, so Alice expects events to take place as they do in her waking world. When her expectations are contradicted, she is confused to the point of annoyance or distress. This is because the real Alice has already entered the signifying chain as a little girl in Victorian English society.

artist credit pending

Alice is reborn as a grown child into Wonderland, crawling into and then falling down the rabbit-hole, a reversal of the natural process of being born. What makes her entrance into the dream reality traumatic is the fact that she, unlike a newborn child, has already learned the behavioral codes, the language and the logic of her society, making it hard for her to interpret signs that have different meanings in Wonderland. Let’s examine Alice’s first attempt at communicating in Wonderland.

Her experience is comparable to that of an infant’s entrance into the signifying chain (learning language).

Jasmine Becket Griffith

Once down the rabbit-hole, her first conversation with someone else is with the Mouse that swims by her in the pool of tears. What motivates Alice to speak to the Mouse in the first place is not uninterested polite conversation, but her desire to get out of the pool so she can carry on her journey towards the garden. She approaches the Mouse saying “O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool?” (24) But the Mouse does not speak to her, and taking note of this, Alice supposes it is because “perhaps it doesn’t understand English” (25). She babbles on, thinking he might be a French mouse, repeating a sentence she has learned in her lesson book, “where is my cat?” – soon realizing this may have been a mistake. When she says aloud “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats,” (Carroll 25) the mouse finally reacts. Alice’s attempts at communicating with the Mouse at this point seem much like that of an infant who is learning its parents’ language. The infant babbles until it gets the parents’ attention and hence, whatever it is it desires. Luckily for Alice, the Mouse does, after all, speak and understand English, but Alice needs a confirmation to be sure they are communicating.

Alice learns that though they speak essentially the same language, there is a difference in codes. To Mouse, cats

Henry Rountree

signify something vile. This incident is somewhat like that of a child who innocently repeats an offensive word without the purpose of offending and is told not to say it again. Thus, Alice submits to the language of the other (in this case, the Mouse), by agreeing and understanding that the topic of “cats” is not proper. The Mouse submits to the language of the Other, which is the language of Mice and Mousekind. The signified of “cat” is predetermined by Mice in the same manner that problematic, offensive words and topics are predetermined by culture rather than a personal experience. Alice wants to communicate effectively, so she keeps on correcting herself and trying hard not to offend. She changes the subject of conversation from cats to dogs, only succeeding in upsetting it once more. She enters the Mouse’s language system when she promises not to speak of cats or dogs again. But, being new to it, forgets and mentions her cat Dinah, and, proudly, her ability to catch mice and birds. Her company – the mouse and birds when the pool becomes an ocean- all leave her, and this makes her feel “very lonely and low-spirited” (40). The result of a misunderstanding causes Alice great distress. She is trying to learn their code, but has not fully grasped the conventions. This very same scenario can take place when, for example, a child may innocently speak of subjects that are unsuitable for the dining table, not to offend, but because he or she has yet to conform to codes of etiquette.

Camille Rose Garcia

Performative actions also bear significance in culture, and are generated and perpetuated by the Other, preceding us and generated by some authority. One example is the ritual of the Caucus-race. This consists of running around in a something approximate to the shape of a circle indeterminately. The Dodo is the authority, since he dictates the rules. His posture reminds Alice of Shakespeare, who in Alice’s world, commands literary authority. When the Dodo yells “Stop!” one bird asks who has won, and he replies that everyone has. Another bird asks who will give out the prizes, and the Dodo points to Alice. Alice is obligated to produce a prize, so she looks in her pockets and finds a box of comfits, luckily containing one for everyone, except herself. The Dodo then asks her to produce a prize for herself, so she again reaches into her pocket and finds a thimble. She hands the thimble to the Dodo, who presents it as a prize back to Alice. The whole thing seems absurd to Alice, not organized or logical. She takes a cue from the animals and, trying to be proper, acts seriously. The comfits and thimble are worthless objects, but their value is assigned by the manner in which they are presented. Understanding the meanings of the exchanges of actions and objects is a requisite of becoming a link in the signifying chain of culture.

Alice’s repeated misinterpretations and being misinterpreted are what define her in Wonderland as a stranger, or an other. When she does not understand something, it is only because she cannot. Her slightly different language accentuates Alice’s otherness. Our world only makes sense to us because we learn to, by subjecting to it and thus becoming a part of it.

Works Cited (here)

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass and what Alice Found There. Connecticut: Konecky & Konecky, 1999.

Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. New York: Norton & Company, 2006.

I’ve also embedded my PowerPoint presentation below, which will make little sense without me talking on and on in the background (unless you’ve thought these things over yourself)… Enjoy.

Yesterday I gave a talk at the English Department in Humanities, UPR RP, about David Bowie’s character Jareth in Labyrinth. I won’t go too much into it right now, because it will be my next post, but wanting to share that somewhat informal paper led me to want to post about this one. As I was writing about the film’s appeal to a certain group of people, I couldn’t help thinking about the many similar elements between the film and the Alice stories.

In September, I was part of a panel at the Alice Through the Ages conferences in Homerton College, the college of education at the University of Cambridge. Last summer, I only mentioned the possibility in passing, as I was unsure about whether or not I would be able to go, and I really, really wanted to. The funny thing is, I wrote my last post from Cambridge when they posted the Utopística video interview and I didn’t even mention it.

This was 6 months ago, and I still get excited when I talk about it. I met so many wonderful (of course), brilliant people, a handful I am now fortunate to call friends. Homerton was the most appropriate of places, a beautiful garden with fragrant flowers in bloom. I wanted to attend every conference (as many of us did), but there were too many going on at the same time. In short, it was all perfect and one of the happiest times of my life.

I am about to post an excerpt from the actual paper. Having mentioned this event before, I felt an update on what happened was owed to the imaginary followed of this blog. I’ll exhaust anyone who cares to listen when they ask, I don’t intend to do it all over again to you, imaginary readers. Lots of things happened, all great, and the panels were fascinating. We all hope for an anthology with our essays, because having met, we are so curious to read the papers we missed. So here’s a gallery in place of an enthusiastic re-telling. I’ve left out the ones with other humans in them (except for Mary Galbraith as The Duchess in the mirror… oh, and that little girl), because I didn’t ask for permission to post them outside of social media, which is semi-private.

I said I wasn’t going to, but I have to share one funny story. In the elevator to our rooms, I complimented a very friendly lady’s violet curls, and we giggled. What I didn’t know at the moment was that she was Karen Coats, whom I used in my research and quoted in my presentation (click the image on the left). A fellow speaker in my panel introduced us, he was friends with her and warned me she would be there, which increased my irrational anxiety. She hadn’t arrived then, though, but it still made me very nervous. I got to spend time with her the day after the hair incident, along with a few other people I ended up loving on a human level, besides the intellectual admiration/fandom. This was but one of the many, many highlights.

This post is a sort of colorful introduction for the next, which was what I thought I was writing when I started. “A brief introduction,” I thought, “I’ll confirm that I did get to go and I’ll post an excerpt, done.” I had been meaning to do this earlier… but I rarely have a moment to even wash my hair lately (yes, since September – I do wash my hair, though – which is why I don’t write blog posts) so I’m taking advantage of tonight (hi, Santurce es Ley) to post some content before it’s already been a year since. #adjunctlife

Some nights ago one of my best friends, Susana, had told me she was writing for an online magazine (Hedy Mag) and needed to interview an interesting woman. Because she illustrated a great number of stories in Sparks, she thought she would interview Zuleyka (the author), but as it sometimes happens with writers, she chose me because she’s known me since we were sisters and friends in past lives, making it easier to write up specific questions. NO PROBLEM.

Here’s the fun part – Susana and I, along with a third friend, Teresa (the first to publish any kinds of comments about my first book and whose journal entry is still linked on the right, if it’s still there – hopefully, yes), have never met in person. We first bonded by reading each other’s livejournals over ten years ago, have lost and regained contact over the years, and now speak every whenever because now we have smartphones and social media. We’ve even spoken to one another recently, a luxury in the decade of dialup and long-distance calls. When we were younger, the three of us would chat on MSN Live Messenger and send each other gifts and letters in the mail, learning about each others’ lives, but mostly, keeping each other company in a way that transcends time and space.

Susana tried to make this interview about my writing and said some very nice and flattering things, but these disembodied memories of one of my most important friendships is the subtext in both her questions and my responses.

Click below to see the whole magazine, it’s lovely and smart and all the things you love if “nonconformist women” sounds good to you.

I took a cell phone pic of my computer screen (below) because the layout is gorgeous and I couldn’t capture that on my cell phone.

Sweet mother of WiFi.

I know it’s a daring move, but I also screencapped (further below) the first page of Susana’s interview with me and pasted it below to share it here.
Do go see the whole issue, though!

The wait for Zuleyka’s book of short stories,Sparks, is finally OVER. Editing this book was my main (to not say only) activity during July, so I appreciate everyone who put up with my cranky scowls, and understood my declining what seemed like really fun invitations. This is the first book I edit that is not one of my own (secrets just keep on popping up, don’t they?), but I treated the project with the same obsessive drive that I would have one of my own, if not more so. (For sure I did, actually.) Our artist friends joined in and provided us with varied, unique styles that make this book absolutely loveable.

It will be available at bookstores, eventually, as we gather more funds for printing costs. We need to give copies to our illustrators, which is why those pre-orders meant SO MUCH (thanks again). And regular orders do, too! With one purchase, you allow us to print yours and 1.5 more.

A book presentation is due, I’ll be announcing it everywhere as soon as it’s scheduled.

Anthology of Puerto Rican Sci Fi

This is what’s next.

You may remember a call for submissions we hosted a few months back.

David Caleb Acevedo, José Román and myself made our selections, now David Caleb and Pabsi Livmar are helping me out with editing the texts. This is a project I really look forward to completing, because it’s yet another kind of collaboration I’ll be taking part in for the very first time.

And also, THE TEXTS. There are poems, short stories, novel fragments, essays and comics from authors we know, ones we just discovered, were fans of, are new fans of, are our talented friends (or all of the above).

For my English-only followers (that I fantasize about having… are you out there?), the anthology is Spanish only. We hope to maybe not do this for the next. And it’s exclusive to Puerto Rican authors because, well, we thought it was necessary.

We are pushing to release this in about a month… I hope I don’t have a nervous breakdown in the process, since I’ll be teaching meanwhile. I might.

We would like to be somehow involved in this:

There’s more info out there, Google it if you’re curious or if you’d like the specifics.

I attended to all the conferences I humanly could at the UPR last year, it was such a success. I got to meet science fiction authors from Puerto Rico, elsewhere in the Caribbean, and Latin America. I’m sure you can relate, authors are some of the best quality, fulfilling people to know and talk to. Usually.

I left with arm-fulls of books and a head full of memories.

If I can manage to push out Ciencia Fricción by then, which I think is possible, we will most probably be involved.

If not, I will have been killed by the co-editors, but the book will be on the margins anyway.

You’ll see.

Friends have asked me about what I’m working on myself. I always have ideas that run on their own, and suddenly grow claws and scales and wings, and they twitch and scratch from inside my skull until I have to process and mold them into something tangible. But nothing tangible for the moment, only intangible.

There’s news that are either spectacular or tragic, only right now, I don’t know which it is – but will find out in two weeks or less.

Close friends know about it, most people don’t, but Lacan Read Through the Looking Glass (my MA thesis directed by Michael Sharp) was accepted to the event on the image you can appreciate on the right.

If all goes well, I’ll be presenting and representing at Cambridge.

Because I’m working class, on an adjunct professor’s salary, you might understand what I’m getting at…

… needing to say no more… if you catch my drift…

In the meantime, I’m adapting a lengthy text (that somehow, friends and mentors have actually enjoyed reading, bless your hearts) into something fun, a pretty Power Point presentation with pictures (alliteration accidental).

What I’m waiting on is for money to… well, fall from the sky, to put it simply (but not after having offered up blood sacrifices, offerings, chants and prayers to the corresponding gods – and it hurts).

If it doesn’t happen, well… I might cry in my room. For days, maybe weeks. And patiently wait for the next lifetime when Lewis Carroll’s Alice turns 250 or 300, when the economy or transportation as we know it has drastically changed for the better, or when I am born elsewhere (and somehow managed to write a thesis on the same books… getting carried away, maybe, but no, not really).

Author, Zuleyka Robles, myself, two illustrators (Pamela and Maricarmen) and Lian, at Tintero 2015. Look at that majestic mergoat.

My eyeballs are burning and, as I told my friend Zuleyka, the author of Sparks, “I’m kind of manic” because I’ve been working on her book for so long and it is ALMOST DONE. Almost. But before I sleep, I want to share my excitement with everyone.

This means you can get your hands on it pretty soon (July? Hopefully.) and it will be absolutely worth it.

Sparks consists of microstories (rejoice, commitment-phobic and/or lazy readers) that, in spite of being only a few sentences long, are concise and stab you right in the feels.

Our unexpected bonus was the willingness of our artist friends to collaborate with illustrations for many of the stories – as well as their enthusiasm. So this book will have tons of illustrations in a variety of styles that represent how the artist interpreted the stories. It even inspires me, so I might end up illustrating one or two.

I don’t want to share any of her stories because that will spoil the surprise. Some of the illustrations have already been shared, but there is so much more.

What I don’t mind sharing, however, is a fragment of the foreword I wrote. I’m really hoping to make you curious and want to read Sparks (as well as the rest of this introduction).

Do you remember the last time you lit sparklers? Think about it for a moment. If your memory is a recent one, you were probably in the company of other adults, laughing, cheering and having fun. Maybe you were even inebriated. If your memory is from childhood, you may remember getting accidentally burned by the crackling sparks, or having touched the glowing ember (against your better judgment). Then, lighting your sparklers with respect or apprehension, holding it a safe distance away from your body. The next day or after that special event, you may have had to dispose of the ugly, black wires making a mess on the floor, all with a hint of melancholy, now that the party is over and routine resumes.

Zuleyka’s stories exploit the moments we overlook. While we may reminisce about parties, the fun stories we prefer to tell, the sparks in this book reveal the most private events: the actions and interactions (the initial sparks) that light up fires of passion. The author leaves the fires and explosions to the reader’s imagination, but strategically so, that we may imagine an outcome according to our own values, experiences and individual traumas. Some are fires that melt away the biting cold, others, fires of shame, anger and despair that scorch the flesh and nerves. The most persistent dilemma throughout Sparks is that of love, but from different points of view: parent, small child, adult child, lover, ex-lover, spouse, friend, stranger, enemy, self. Some stories are about the strike of the match, some, about the burning. Some are about picking up the trash the day after the party.
Every story offers insight into hidden parts within our selves, even the most seemingly fantastical or unlikely. When have you not been so affected that you felt as if trapped in fiction? Overwhelmed to hyperbolic proportions, that you knew yourself to have become a beast, or have your soul float out of your body? On the other hand, there is the impossibly real: monsters in the mirror, self-injury, homicidal impulses towards those we love the most. In Sparks is a mirror: we are all neurotic. We have all had a few seconds of psychosis, of paranoid schizophrenia that, with a small change of events, revert us to mental and emotional “stability.” (…)

Just look at that table full of communion, friendship and beauty.

We had lots of fun at Tintero (back in March – establishing some continuity from my last post).

We could barely fit all of our stuff on the table, but mission accomplished. We took some emails from visitors interested in Sparks, gave them free stuff like pins, stickers and bookmarks (which seemed to scare most people, as in “why are you giving me things?”)… so if by chance you were one of those folks, expect some goodness coming your way soon.

The infamous Mergoat has been making rounds since WELIF came out stamped as a subVERSE publication, but no questions were asked and nothing was revealed. Yes, this is my doing. All of it, including the logo design, though it was vastly improved by graphic designer Yellowfiv3 (Daniel Hornbek), without whom this goat would look like a chunky, fluffy little nerd (yes, I mean my original drawing). The website and facebook page have been around for a while as well, but only recently have I started plugging it, for two reasons:

1 – Ciencia Fricción. A friend of mine (let’s call him Joss Erdbrards) suggested myself andElijah Snowteam up and publish a Science Fiction anthology featuring only Puerto Rican authors. Of course, we didn’t even think about it. subVERSE was my still my little secret, with a pending project left in perpetual hiatus because of my overwhelming amount of work (as in employment), but I obviously took it. subVERSE took it. Hence, Ciencia Fricción will be coming out much later this year as an index of our coolest authors around.

2 – Sparks. Sparks has been a project pending for a little over a year now. THE aforementioned. My friend, Zuleyka Robles-Avilés has written a beautiful collection of micro-stories that I am honored to put together in the form of a book. She came to me with the idea of combining it with illustrations by artist friends. (Ok, we’re all friends, but this buddy system has been extremely productive…) I didn’t have to think about that either. We’ve been adding illustrations by volunteer artists who keep on surprising us with their interpretations. We’re estimating this book to be published around Summer of this year. I’m not revealing names of artists – YET – because the list is rather long, but you will hear all about it soon. Some you may already know (everyone is in this book! Well, not everyone, but the artist nearest and dearest to myself and Zuleyka).

As soon as March!

We will be at Festival Tintero with all the artists who make it. Our artists will be exhibiting their artwork and selling their goodies. We will also have proof copies of Sparks that you can flip through and special guest authors and artists that are subVERSE allies and family.

I am excited about all this and spending sleepless nights plotting, scheming, stitching, sketching and work, work, working.

The only downside is I’ve had to pause the plans I had for my own projects and publications, but only for the moment.

In March I was invited by my friends, Daniel Pommers and Miguel Pruné (associated with their individual books, collaborations, and tons of other publications) also known as Gato Malo Editores, to present Daniel’s book of poetry, Que Así Sea(which you can google to read lots more about it, or check it out locally at bookstores – or HERE).

This picture is just for fun:

This is the first time I present a book (surely not the last), and my experience was both intimate and alienating. Mostly alienating at first… repeatedly I asked Daniel, “Me? Are you sure…?” because our styles and backgrounds are somewhat different. Then the doubts, “what if I’m getting this all wrong…?” – which is fine, when you don’t personally know the author, or if the author is dead in a literal sense. But then, inclusive… reconstruction of a person and his literary work through deconstruction.

I read this is front of a crowd of mostly his friends and family, whose expressions were quite difficult to read. But he smiled the entire time, so I suppose my analysis wasn’t too off.

Considering this will otherwise be lost forever in a sea of digital documents, I’m sharing a shortened version of it here… and perhaps, to awaken some curiosity in you and motivate you to go look for it and read it!

It’s in Spanish, by the way. I suppose you’ll notice that… (Also: No accents on account of not understanding shortcuts on Windows8. I suppose you’ll notice that, but I do know my rules, please don’t be mistaken.)

Naelle Devannah is a long time friend whom I met about a decade ago on deviantART. (Well, she found me.)

She an all-around loveable person, anyone can confirm it. But we became friends immediately because of our mutual admiration. This is how I first started getting to know her, her visual art. I felt a kinship with her because of our similar circumstances (isolated goth girls from “the country,” creatures of the web) and our love for the aesthetic contrast of darkness and bold, bold color. (A tropical symptom, I suppose).

Visit her site, there’s lots to love that will keep your eyes busy for days.

I asked for her feedback on Stars Like Fish (which is printed on the back of the book) because I knew she would understand. Our imaginations are neighboring lands.

We plug each other often, but yet, I was beyond flattered to have a space in her blog (which is quote popular!)

This is part of her series “Getting to Know…” – where she asks personalized questions to artists of all kinds, giving an in-depth look into their intentions, motivations and personality.

You work with a combination of painterly words, photography and illustration. What’s your perception of the term visual art? What can you foresee in future creative generations?

Maybe my “painterly words” are my frustration… I know my writing is very visual. When I discovered photo editing, I got the same satisfaction as I did describing scenes. Illustration, you flatter me so, but yes, I like to doodle.
My perception of visual art is something arcane and academic that I am only vaguely familiar with and learn about through people like you and observing what they do… perhaps it shouldn’t be, but having spent so many years in academia can make you a little insecure before talking about something without a theoretical background. However, and this is a total contradiction, visual art is, at the same time, something so accessible to absolutely anyone with properly functioning eyes… we can interpret images as signs, in a manner that they should say something, or ask us something, but then again, we can also just enjoy something beautiful or ugly for what it is. So I guess I shift from one starting point to the other, depending on what’s comfortable at the moment. You can either have a long conversation about a piece of art, or write a long paper about it, or just like it. And I guess the same goes for the creation of visual art… you might transmit, transgress, transcend, or just make something.